Amerikkka to Haiti: Take What We Offer!

Thornton Kimes/PNN
Friday, January 15, 2010;

I recently saw a PBS Newshour segment broadcast before the January 2010 earthquake. The PBS Newshour speaks to so many conservative and ultra-conservative “experts” these days I wonder what and why they are so scared of alternate, “left” experts and our/their facts and opinions.

The story was that neo-liberal Bill Clinton, given the status of U.N. Special Envoy to the poorest country in Amerikkka’s back yard, took an army of potential investors there. The talking heads on PBS said that Haitians needed to understand that this is their last chance to get anyone to help them. Don’t Haitians already understand, well enough, the centuries of slavery, oppression, and political violence they have endured?

Translation: take what we offer {translation translation: we’ve got you where we’ve always had you—slaves to whatever we say goes.} or we’ll walk.

Bill Clinton, tour guide? Really? The neo-liberal who wrecked Amerikkkan welfare? The neo-liberal who blockaded Haiti and cooperated with the coup that took Jean Bertrand Aristide from his elected position as leader of the people of Haiti? That Bill Clinton?

Yeah. I know that’s what Clinton and others would like to believe, what they wanted Haitians and us to believe, but leaving an open festering wound in the community of nations, untreated, unhealed, is the most time-tested recipe for blow-back. Does Amerikkka want a Caribbean branch of Al Queda to develop? My guess is yes, if “they” are even thinking that clearly.

The “experts” say Haiti changed starting in 2005, that there is no more political gang violence. Why? Is it because the people got tired of it, or did the wealthy families controlling the country decide on a different set of strategies and tactics? Haiti was founded as part of the real Bermuda Triangle of the slave trade, plantation slavery, and the production and (international) marketing of hard liquor. The people with the power can deal with the earthquakes and hurricanes, they live in a “win-win-win” world even with the means of production flattened and the workers traumatized.

So now we have a new disaster in a place that seems to be a magnet for them. The Haitian Diaspora desperately wants to help. Everyone wants to help. The Amerikkkan news media half-heartedly scratched the surface and mentioned the Duvalier family dictatorship, but, as usual, didn’t go deep enough into the history or the present.

Haiti needs help, but what kind of help? Americans are rightfully pissed at the interlocked banking and investment industries, and some of us are rightfully righteously pissed about opportunities being missed to fix health care and other things. There should be many eyes focused on what will be done for and to Haiti and her people, or we’ll be talking about the same ol’ same ol’ filthy mcnasty horror again in a few years.